Fairtest: Weekly Report on Resistance to Inappropriate Testing

7 Comments Post your own or leave a trackback: Trackback URL

1. Donna says:

   October 20, 2015 at 6:02 pm

   http://www.nj.com/education/2015/10/nj_parcc_scores.html#incart_2box_nj-homepage-featured

   LikeLike

   Reply
2. Laura H. Chapman says:

   October 20, 2015 at 6:49 pm

   California is probably in for some trouble. Look at what is in store with Fair Test waiving the red flag here.

   California Incorporating Social and Emotional Learning Into School Accountability
http://edsource.org/2015/incorporating-social-emotional-learning-into-school-accountability-bookman-commentary/88989

   Tests for social-emotional-learning (SEL) are being rushed into existence for “accountability” by some of the usual suspects who cannot be bothered with a nuanced and evidence-based discussion of the issues. Check the link and who is funding this work in California.

   SEL measures are also being forwarded by USDE with four SEL projects,, about $2 million for Year 1, with two sites in California. Researchers at Stanford engineered the grant program a year before the grant applications were solicited. In short, USDE’s promotion of SEL tests was an inside job, and tied into Obama’s “My Brother’s Keeper Initiative.”

   In any case, the rush to test for SEL is the latest hot policy and being foisted on schools nationwide. Illinois started things off in 2004 with standards for SEL at five grade levels, all based on a tacit recycling of character education and risk management for anti-social behavior, impulse control, and so on.

   A number of Illinois SEL “objectives” call for students to learn ”self-management skills,” engage in what should be called “self-psychoanalysis” (Analyze your feelings about—-), with causal reasoning in high school about the connections between feelings and behaviors, one’s own along with some heroic inferences about causal links for others.

   Here are two Illinois standards:
   Standard 1A.Ia, for grades K-3” “Recognize and accurately label emotions and how they are linked to behavior.”

   Note that word “accurate.” Has no one looked at a thesaurus? Or looked at the issue of “expressing and identifying emotion” in the visual, literary, and performing arts? What is indicative of accuracy in the fluid and elusive feeling states that signal we are alive?

   Note also an expectation for children to engage in cause/effect reasoning about matters notoriously subtle and elusive, even for professionally trained adults. Is the teacher to accept “Joe hit me and made me cry” as sufficient?

   Here is Standard 1A,3b, for Middle-Jr.High. To me, it reads like a tip from a best selling book for entrepreneurs: “Apply strategies to manage stress and to motivate successful performance.”

   I am still looking at SEL and related concepts. So far, standards and recommended teaching methods strike me as no more than stop-loss urging and metrics. These include staying out of jail; staying off welfare; avoiding sexually transmitted diseases; being free of addictions to drugs and alcohol. There are few explicit benefits, staying healthy, earning a living wage, (inevitably) getting ready for “college and career,” and the pursuit of “success,” with not much need to imagine or think about the possibilities for a “good life.”

   SEL resources on “growth mindsets” and “fixed “mindsets” about one’s intellectual abilities, talents, and personality are hot ideas formulated by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck and marketed at the Mindsets website some under the brand “Brainology.”
   The products include prescriptive materials for teachers, with some diagnostic measures taking only a minute or so of time, all suitable for on-line assessment, data-gathering, and return of results to judge student well-being, along with teacher and school performance.

   For a nuanced discussion of the pitfalls in measuring these so-called “non-cognitive skills” or personal qualities, or dispositions, or mindsets, see: Measurement Matters: Assessing Personal Qualities Other Than Cognitive Ability for Educational Purposes, by Angela L. Duckworth1 and David Scott Yeager, Educational Researcher, Vol. 44 No. 4, pp. 237– 251, © 2015 AERA. http://er.aera.net

   Followers of Phyllis Schlalfly and Eagle Forum and Rush are sure to insist that SEL learning is values-indoctrination, and improper in schools.

   From what I have learned so far, SEL tests are not ready for prime time, even if they were disconnected from deficit thinking about students, their parents, and teachers, and schools, and so on.

   SEL strikes me as a strategy for reducing the need for school counselors and social workers. SEL seems to be a jerry-rigged patchwork of compensatory moves to amend a strict focus on “academic” achievement that has distorted education while allowing “no nonsense” interventions and school suspensions to flourish.

   LikeLike

   Reply
3. Involved Mom says:

   October 20, 2015 at 6:52 pm

   So, slowly, we are undoing what we were forced to do by Arne. Yes?

   LikeLike

   Reply
   • SCCNY says:

     October 20, 2015 at 7:51 pm

     Not with King as his replacement. And Elia to follow it.

     LikeLike

     Reply
   • RageAgainstTheTetsocracy says:

     October 20, 2015 at 8:20 pm

     Nothing can be “undone” until the re-write and re-authorization of the ESEA is signed by president Obama. Ironically, Arne Duncan used the force of federal law (NCLB) to illegally implement the Common Core Waiver Program. This has been about federal LAW from the get-go, and it still is. The Senate and House have approved their own versions of a new bill and we are anxiously awaiting the compromise bill that will be sent to president Obama.

     The requirement for Common Core standards will be eliminated.

     Yearly testing in math and ELA in grades 3 to 8 will be maintained.

     Disaggregated, sub-group testing data will be maintained.

     The federal AYP requirement will probably be eliminated.

     Teacher evaluations will be determined by the states and the federal requirement to use tests scores in teacher evaluations will probably be eliminated.

     Accountability continues to be the major sticking point.

     The federal role in testing will be greatly diminished.

     LikeLike

     Reply
4. SCCNY says:

   October 20, 2015 at 7:50 pm

   Reblogged this on stopcommoncorenys.

   LikeLike

   Reply
5. LeftCoastTeacher says:

   October 21, 2015 at 9:32 am

   I have to throw this in somewhere. Howard Blume of the LATimes reports no one is attending the community input sessions to find a nonBroad superintendent. Here’s a list of meeting dates in the article: http://achieve.lausd.net/nexssuperintendent

   LikeLike

   Reply